Professional image is one of the downward spiraling fundamentals in the business world, causing communication breakdowns, lost advancement opportunities, and negative outcome interviews.
Some of the simplest, most basic things are getting in the way of employees being advanced and getting jobs and companies doing business together.
Professionalism starts with appearance.  We are told as kids “not to judge a book by its [...]

I’ve been re-reading Ben Franklin’s Autobiography for the “umpteenth” time.  In his long journey of self-improvement, he came up with his own 13 “virtues”, which I will list below.  This would be a great set of values for any company or employee! It comes from a man who was not of any religion, but established his own moral [...]

  This morning at our weekly MAC Toastmasters Meeting I was asked to give a short recap of my Saturday breakout session “Pumping Mental Iron”. One of the things I didn’t get to do on Saturday, since my time was shortened (read my last blog post) from 50 minutes to about 35-40 minutes, was to do [...]

I just arrived back home after delivering a breakout session on brainpower for Communicatiion ‘10, The District 7 Toastmasters Spring Conference at eh Oregon Convention Center. Because the introductory keynote ran a bit over, I had to cut our session short, so thought it would be helpful to post an outline for you, since we did rather race to [...]

What does an executive performance coach really do?
 
People hire physical trainers for a number of reasons: perhaps to lose weight, build muscle, gain overall health, rehabilitate from an injury, train for a specific event, such as a triathlon, or work on a specific skill (as a professional athlete would).
 
Great leaders in business hire executive performance [...]

 
For many years we have been studying leadership, and it is the topic of development courses, books, workshops, keynote speeches, blogs, and so forth.  Are leaders born or made?  Who are our best examples of leadership?  Is good leadership different today than twenty years ago? Who was a better leader: Lincoln or Patton?
 
We read the [...]

All of us need to improve our decision making abilities in this business environment. 
IQ (Intelligence Quotient) measures your overall general intelligence. EQ (Emotional Quotient) measures your emotional intelligence: your ability to sense, understand, and effectively apply the power and acumen of emotions to facilitate high levels of collaboration and productivity.  This is how effective leaders [...]